Elliot S. Maggin
Elliot S. Maggin has written at least 500 comic book stories, including
time as a principal writer of Superman comics from 1971
until 1986. Two of his novels include Superman: Last Son of Krypton and
Superman: Miracle Monday.
His most recent novel is Generation X (co-authored with Scott Lobdell).

First there was the novel. Then there was the novel based on the blockbuster movie screenplay. Now,
wait for it, there is the novel based on the blockbuster comic book mini-series.

Wait! Come back! It's actually good! It's even great.

Honest! Cross my heart and hope to... whatever.

You see, Kingdom Come was no ordinary comic book series. It was the superhero genre
event of the 1990s. Illustrator Alex Ross was fresh from his blockbuster collaboration with
writer Kurt Busiek on the genre-refreshing and historically evocative Marvels mini-series
from, natch, Marvel Comics. Told from the perspective of an ordinary man watching the birth of the superhero
in the Marvel Comics fictional universe, Marvels was a literary, artistic and commercial
success. Ross' incredibly detailed and evocative paint style of comic art made him an overnight superstar,
and probably made Kingdom Come inevitable.

Kingdom Come was initially perceived as the direct antithesis of Marvels. Where the latter
explored the naïve, primary-coloured origins of Marvel's superhumans, Kingdom Come explores the
possible future gotterdamerung of their DC counterparts. Written by Mark Waid -- himself a figure
of acclaim for his dramatic re-calibration and re-energizing of such staid characters as DC's Flash
and Marvel's Captain America -- Kingdom Come the comic book sold extremely well and received
generally positive critical acclaim.

But still, but still... many readers and critics had a sense that the series (and the trade paperback
graphic novel which collects all four issues under one cover) didn't quite gel. Where Busiek and Ross
had an almost seamless collaboration on Marvels, you could almost feel the fissure-lines between
Mark Waid and Ross in Kingdom Come. Waid seemed intent on telling the story of
the Twilight of the Gods, focussing primarily on the DC Holy Trinity of Batman, Superman and Wonder
Woman. Ross, for his part, seemed obsessed with the character of Norman McCay, a Protestant minister
caught up in the events leading up to the Last of Days. The tension between these two aspects of the
story never seemed adequately reconciled and the comic series, despite its technical brilliance, in
the end failed to satisfy on some level.

The novelization by Elliot S. Maggin, however, rectifies most of these problems. Like the movie
version of The Bridges of Madison County, the adaptation is in many ways superior to
its source material.

Maggin's name, of course, is well-known to generations of comic book fans. A writer of
Superman comics between 1971 and 1986, Maggin distinguished himself as a man who truly
understood the mythological underpinnings of the material he was writing before such understanding
was fashionable. In the 1980s he wrote two Superman novels, Last Son of Krypton and
Miracle Monday which, though packaged like tie-ins to the Christopher Reeve movies, were actually
original works of considerable charm and talent. Maggin is one of a very small stable of writers
who can convincingly write superhero adventure in prose form.

To be fair to Waid and Ross, Maggin had considerably more landscape to play with. Though comics
are a medium better suited to interiors and omniscient narration than film, there is just much
more room for this kind of interplay in a 330 page novel, and Maggin makes the most of this
additional playroom. He expands upon the motivations of characters, ties disparate story elements
together, throws in extensive background and historical detail (the geologic origins of the
Batcave, for God's sake!) and most importantly, provides a deeper and more fulfilling resolution
to the story than Waid and Ross were able to do. Maggin, perhaps because he had the luxury of
time and distance, was able to distill the essence of what Waid and Ross were trying to say better
than they were themselves.

Not bad, for a novel based on a comic book series featuring a cast of thousands, set in an
alternate future of the DC Comics universe.

Mark Shainblum is the co-editor of Arrowdreams: An Anthology Of Alternate Canadas (Nuage Editions,
1997) the first anthology of Canadian alternate history. A veteran of the comic book field, Mark co-created
the 1980's Canadian superhero Northguard and currently writes the Canadian political parody series
Angloman both in the form of a paperback book series and as a weekly comic strip in the
Montreal Gazette. He lives in Montreal with his computer, his slippers and a motley
collection of books.